Attacks on the global supply chain—sabotaging hardware components, installing malware or backdoors in software—are stuff security nightmares are made of. The ICT Task Force, formed by the Department of Homeland Security, meets to help companies manage their risk.

Three years ago, the United States shifted to chip-enabled credit and debit cards. The big promise was that chip cards would reduce payment card fraud. While that is mostly true, millions of chip-cards are still getting stolen because some merchants haven't made the switch.

Despite high-profile data breaches, increased scrutiny of how consumer data is used, and several hearings, there hasn’t been a lot of movement on privacy legislation out of Congress. That may change if lawmakers decide to pass the U.S. version of the European Union's data privacy law.

IBM has been touting the potential of using Watson to help security analysts analyze large volumes of security data and make security decisions. The National Institutes of Standards and Technology may be considering using AI to help determine the severity of software vulnerabilities.